Abstracts

Catharina Raudvere and Mogens Pelt, University of Copenhagen.

raudvere@hum.ku.dk and mpelt@hum.ku.dk

Introduction: Nostalgia and the Many Roads in Modernity

The project "The Many Roads in Modernity" aims to study the relationship between the modern history of South-East Europe and the long imperial past of the region, and to use this approach as an alternative to the prevailing models which are based on opposition: Europe versus the Balkans and the West versus Islam. Through this, we expect to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the many roads to modernity in Europe. The focus is on the changes in identity, self-representation and affiliation in light of the huge systemic pressure triggered by the interaction between external influences and local and regional practice from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the present day. This is studied in the project on different levels from the state to the local community, along with changes in art, literature and religious practice.

The present workshop falls within one of three focus areas in the project, "Nostalgia – Loss and Creativity. Political and Cultural Representations of the Past in South East Europe". The uses of history as a mirror are apparent in South East Europe after 1989, but the modes of expression are much more complex than the media image of popular nostalgia only.

We would like to invite discussions on how the past is used as a tool in the narratives of origin and belonging and what narratives, rhetorical dichotomies and symbols are employed in public debate, art and popular culture. There are, however, also more material aspects of the representation of history than discursive expressions: the place of history and future in cityscapes, city planning, architecture, public art and monuments. With a broad range of cases, we hope the conference will approach the fundamental issues about who is making what definitions of borders and boundaries – in terms of geography, ethnicity, citizenship, culture and art – when claims are made about ‘culture’, ‘history, ‘belonging’ – and what arenas are available for the transmission of ideas when identity politics go from rhetoric to implementation.

Isa Blumi, Georgia State University.

iblumi@gsu.edu

Battles of Nostalgic Proportion: The Transformations of Islam as Historical Force in Kosovar Reconstitutions of the recent past, 1990-2013

Albanians inhabiting Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Southern Serbia face some challenges today as a result of conflicts for political and economic ascendancy over the last twenty years.  Albanians are often caught in the difficult position of having to deflect external associations that still orientate foreigners’ policies toward the region.  As elsewhere in the Balkans, Albanian politicians in Kosovo wishing to survive the integration of their societies into global affairs since 1990 have learned to work within these crude associations dominated in a particular by Islamophobia.  As a result of such adjustments, the reapplication of tropes about Albanians’ distinctive ethnoreligious heritage has created important political niches. One of the more important ones has been the use of religious institutions to serve as totems of political legitimacy. As discussed in this presentation, not only does Islam constitute the ideal emblem for self and collective political orientation since the late Yugoslav period—both negatively and positively—it has become the crucial point of distinction that defines the political horizons for some Albanians.

As international forces remain crucial to shaping how key players in the daily affairs of Albanians’ the lingering self-definition through associations with Islam (and Catholicism) have become new markers of the limits to accessing the patronage of external actors. In the context of a shrinking pool of resources, how religion transforms with the iteration of collective memory may prove especially interesting to scholars hoping to understand what mobilizes stakeholders in the Balkans today. Put differently, as community-building agendas form within this complex of domestic and international interests, the aim to monopolize the past (in our case for this presentation, the constructive use of nostalgia) becomes a factor. As explored in this presentation, it is what form this nostalgia takes…for a secular world view informed by Yugoslavia; for a pre-Islamic Albanian/Christian/European essence; or for the Ottoman era of Albanian ascendency in the world…will prove crucial to gaining new insight into the recent political shifts in Albanian politics in the Balkans. In the process of highlighting some of the important shifts taking place among various Muslim constituencies since 1999, this chapter also suggests that these conjunctures of strategies and political expediency may contribute to future instabilities in largely neglected corners of the region. One especially dangerous trajectory is the new mainstream role granted Muslim Fundamentalists—Salafists—as Kosovo becomes an EU-sanctioned recruitment zone for radical mercenary operations infiltrating Libya, Syria, and beyond.

Keith Brown, Brown University.

keith_brown@brown.edu

Beli damka (Blank stains): On Anti-communism and Ante-communism 

The past three-five years have seen substantial changes to the urban fabric of Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia. Many critics have speculated on the meaning or function of this dramatic overhaul; "hard" data on the economic or symbolic logic driving the campaign remains hard to come by.  In a two-part, nine-hour interview in early 2013, President Gjorgi Ivanov shared insights on his development as a civil society scholar and activist in the late 1980s, during the last years of socialist Yugoslavia, and his growing interest in ancient philosophy and history, and their importance for contemporary Macedonian identity.

Ger Duijzings, University College London.

g.duijzings@ucl.ac.uk

Transforming the Edifice: Post-socialist Engagements with the House of the People in Bucharest

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to describe, first, the communist ‘systematization’ and ‘modernisation’ of Bucharest’s city centre, the vast and brutal interventions in the urban fabric during the 1980s, and secondly, the transformation and domestication of these socialist landscapes and edifices after 1989, focusing on the Civic Centre and the House of the People. It will analyse the erasure of parts of Bucharest’s old centre and neighbourhoods as a form of ‘spatial cleansing’ (Michael Herzfeld), and the process of demolition and construction as one of Ceausescu's most effective instruments or 'technologies' of power. The second part will look at the House of the People’s post-socialist fragmentation, appropriation and ‘domestication’, making the authoritarian edifice less threatening and more human, even to the extent that, many Romanians now admire the building as a symbol of national achievement. Most attention will be given to the numerous artistic engagements with the House, centred around the National Museum of Contemporary Art located at the back of the building, which calls for a less complacent, more critical and more explicit reckoning with Bucharest’s traumatic past. They form part of a much wider trend among visual artists in Romania (especially filmmakers) to confront and work through the recent past head-on.

Cecilie Endresen, University of Oslo.

cecilie.endresen@ikos.uio.no

Becoming Greek and Christian? Identity changes among Muslim Albanians in Greece

In Greece, a shift from Islam to Christianity seems to be taking place among migrants from Albania. Most of the Albanians with a Muslim background use Greek Orthodox names – which makes the Albanians refer to them as ‘Jorgot’ (‘the Iorgos’). Many become ‘Greeks’ in one way or the other by suppressing or gradually losing their Albanian identity and language.

The in-between ethnic and religious identities are extremely complex on the individual level. Some of the informants display Christian paraphernalia or convert due to social pressure, but are proud to be Muslim. Others feel Christian but are not baptised, while many say they are both Christian and Muslim. Albanians who have a Christian background or are defined as a Greek minority by Greece are not necessarily more pro-Greek.

A Greek-Orthodox ‘pin code’, as the migrants coin it, makes life a bit easier in the Greek society and dissociates the person from the ‘bad’ Albanians. A new identity is also also a fresh start, a narrative escape from a homeland which has failed. However, it is also a response to ideologies that have constructed Muslims as illegitimate in Europe or the EU as Christian.

This identity-juggling taps into a variety of visions of nationhood, culture, modernity and belonging, in Albania as well as in Greece and Europe. However, it seems unknown to others than Albanians and Greeks and is unexplored in research. My theoretical approach to identity, symbol, nation, ethnicity and religion is constructivist with a focus on symbolic boundaries, and my fieldwork material consists of dozens of in-depth interviews with migrants from Albania.

The religious and ethnic boundary negotiations in the interviews serve as a snapshot of a situation or process and will be analysed in a wider historical and political context: 1. the post-Ottoman de-Islamisation of Greece and Southeast Europe, 2. the legacy of Albanian secularist nationalism and atheist communism, 3. the nationalist construction(s) of ‘Albanians’ and ‘Greeks’ as oppositions, 4. European integration.

Francine Friedman, 
Ball State University.

ffriedma@bsu.edu

Writing for Survival:  Letters of Sarajevo Jews Before Their Liquidation during World War II

In 1941, Bosnia and Herzegovina was fully incorporated into the fascist Independent State of Croatia (NDH).  Sarajevo, the former capital, was occupied by the Nazis.  Their local collaborators, the Ustase, instituted a reign of terror throughout the NDH beginning with a series of decrees denying Jews civil rights, freedom of movement, and control of all of their movable and immovable property. By mid-1942, the Ustase had murdered more than three-fourths of Bosnia's Jews.  But how did the Jewish population exist between the initial occupation and their murder in light of the severe regulations to which they were subjected?  This paper analyzes preserved letters written by Sarajevo Jews detailing their living conditions during that treacherous period, giving us insight into the situation of Jews throughout the NDH.

Fabio Giomi, Central European University (Budapest).

fabio.giomi@gmail.com

The Orient in the West and the West in the Orient: Turkish Modernity throughout the Eyes of Yugoslav Muslims

Also before receiving a codification in the middle of the Thirties, Kemalism became a controversial product in the ideological market of the interwar period. Based on different political references, and tempered by pragmatism and realpolitik, the ideology and practices produced by Mustafa Kamal’s bureaucratic and intellectual entourage triggered a bitter debate everywhere around the world, especially in the post-ottoman space. In the Balkans, Muslim populations – Slavic-speaking, Turkish-speaking and Albanian-speaking alike – followed the Turkish political experience with the greatest attention: extended over the core provinces of the former Ottoman empire, “New Turkey” rapidly became a key subject to discuss the ways Islam and Modernity should (or should not) be conciliated. 

Through a textual analysis of printed sources in the Serbo-Croatian language, this paper will focus on the different perceptions of the Turkish authoritarian modernization developed by the Muslims of Yugoslavia. Taking into account both secular intellectuals (the so-called inteligencija) and religious officials (ilmija), the paper will firstly focus on the conflicting discourses on the “new Turkey” developed into the Yugoslav space during the 1920s and the 1930s. This paper aims to show how the debate on Kemalist Turkey

a) was a highly creative cultural process nourished by transnational circulations of ideas, people and goods (books, newspapers and pictures) crossing both the post-ottoman space and Western Europe;

b) offered Yugoslav Muslim intellectuals the chance to rethink their past (in particular the Ottoman one) but also their future (in particular their position in Yugoslavia, Europe, and in the global Muslim community);

A close exploration of this debate allows us to show how in the interwar period Muslim intellectuals of Yugoslavia perceived the world in a complex and dynamic way, not limited to a narrow West/Orient dichotomy.

Hilde Katrine Haug, University of Oslo.

h.k.haug@ilos.uio.no

Modernists versus Patriots: Politicisation of the Past in Serbia

This paper will address the polarization within contemporary Serbian intellectual and political debates about its past and experience within Yugoslavia. The paper will examine how the construction of opposite and conflicting narratives of Serbia’s recent past has been influenced by diverging values and perceptions of concepts such as modernity, tradition, patriotism nation, identity and visions of Serbia’s role in the region ought to be, during Yugoslav times and after. Furthermore, the study will address the question of how these debates about the past influence current politics, and concurrently, how the narratives constructed have themselves been influenced by contemporary political considerations.

Renee Hirschon, University of Oxford.

renee.hirschon@spc.ox.ac.uk

Surpassing Nostalgia: Personhood, Displacement and Longing for Home

In this presentation, I contend that the loss of a home is not simply a romantic sentiment, a superficial nostalgia. Long-term attachment to a place of origin is a fundamental reaction to the disruption of one’s personhood resulting from forced displacement from one’s home. Using an anthropological perspective with ethnographic examples, I will demonstrate the interconnectedness of person and place, indicating its cross-cultural variability as well as the generalizable common features. I argue against those scholars who deny the relevance of territory and critique the notion of ‘rootedness’ as inapplicable to conditions in the modern global world. However, that sanguine response to accelerated mobility reflects the experience of a limited and privileged elite. It does not aid our understanding of the persistent nostalgia experienced by the vast majority of displaced migrants who continue to express strong bonds with their place of origin.

Zlatko Jovanovic,
University of Copenhagen.

zlatko@hum.ku.dk

”This is a Country for You”: Jugonostalgija and Antinationalism in Post-Yugoslav Popular Music

The paper is placed within the context of recently conducted research on popular music in Socialist Yugoslavia and the formerly Yugoslav lands. The conducted research suggests that popular music is one of the cultural phenomena that has been most shared among the peoples inhabiting the territory of the former Yugoslavia. It suggests, furthermore, that even after the upsurge of ethnic nationalism in the 1980s, Yugoslav popular music continued to function integratively, and argues – considering the persistence of a common popular music culture even after the breakup of the Yugoslav federation in the early 1990s – that there perhaps is very little in cultural life that unites people in the formerly Yugoslav lands more than popular music does.

Against this background, the paper draws attention to the relationship between popular music in former Yugoslav republics and the concept of Jugonostalgija. It criticises the omnipresent understandings of Jugonostalgija as a nostalgic longing for a presumably harmonious past and argues that the popular-cultural phenomenon of Jugonostalgija is not to be confused with nostalgia proper at all. It does so by emphasising that Jugonostalgija in post-Yugoslav popular culture is not about a misty-eyed remembering of an idealised common Yugoslav past but rather a form of identity politics that is better understood as a protest against the dominant interpretations of Yugoslavia’s history – interpretations that serve to legitimise new social order in the post-Yugoslav states and seek to strip Yugoslav history of its subversive potential.

Drawing on several examples from post-Yugoslav popular music, the paper shows that references to common Yugoslav past, including Yugoslav popular music culture of the 1980s, are used not so much to revise the dominant interpretations of the past but to challenge the legitimacy claims of nationalist elites in present. For this reason, the paper concludes that Jugonostalgija in post-Yugoslav popular music should be approached as having more to do with the present state of things in the post-Yugoslav societies, and in particular with nationalism, than with Yugoslavia’s history as such. Acknowledging this, the paper seeks to alter the interpretations of Jugonostalgija that focus on the presumed nostalgic invocation of the lost past and draw attention to the creativity of the present struggle.

Dietmar Müller, Universität Leipzig.

muellerd@uni-leipzig.de

Regionalizing Practices of Landownership: Transylvania, Banat and Vojvodina in the Interwar Period

The reconfiguration of nation states following World War I led to regionalist movements in many East Central and Southeast European societies. These movements frequently expressed cultural, political, economic and legal gravamina against the new centres. Under the influence of both Marxist and national-patriotic historiography, regionalisms were dismissed as entirely backwards-looking phenomena. Only recently has a new type of interpretation based on terms such as “small fatherland” or “open regionalism” revealed the integrative and emancipatory potential of the formation of regional associative relationships.

While regionalisms which draw on cultural and ethnic specificities are rather well-researched topics this is, however, not the case with legal culture as a source of regionalist sentiments and movements. For the Romanian and Yugoslavian post-Habsburg provinces of Transylvania, Banat und Vojvodina institutions and practices of landownership were of particular interest. Especially professionals such as land surveyors, lawyers, land register officials and notaries in these three provinces were couching their gravamina about the large-scale land reforms after World War I in a discourse which was heavily nostalgic towards the Habsburg system of land registering, which they remembered as efficient, accessible for everyone, affordable and blind for ethnicity.

I will analyze post-Habsburg nostalgia as a major source of regionalism in the broader context of legal pluralism and legal culture, stressing the benign effects of regionalism which are centred on the values of a Rechtsstaat rather than on ethnicity.

Trine Stauning Willert, University of Copenhagen.

tsw@hum.ku.dk

“All have a place in God’s imaret”: Nostalgic visions of religious coexistence in contemporary Greek popular historical fiction

200.000 Muslims live in Athens but the city has no official mosque for believers to carry out their religious rituals. Makeshift mosques function in basements and abandoned garages and several have been targets of racist violence. Since 1999, when the city prepared for the 2004 Olympic Games, the building of a state-funded mosque has been debated in the public sphere with the loudest voices being nationalistic and ethnoreligious protests against the mosque. Parallel to these expressions of religious intolerance several popular historical novels in the mid-and late 2000s have treated the issue of religious co-existence in the Ottoman period where churches and mosques functioned side by side. These novels describe friendships, erotic relationships and conversions across cultural, linguistic and religious boundaries suggesting the existence of a common religious or spiritual awareness of the idea of God as a unifying feature in pre-national Ottoman communities. Placing these historical novels about earlier Greek literature on the Ottoman period, the paper analyses three representative novels (Christopoulos 2005, Themelis 2008 and Kalpouzos 2008) covering the geographical areas of Epirus, Macedonia, the Black Sea region, Thrace and Asia Minor. The novels take place over long periods from the mid-nineteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first century, implying deep societal changes brought about by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the effects of modernization. Central in the novels is religious co-existence symbolized by specific religious artefacts, a double-religious amulet, an imaret, and a controversial manuscript from the time of the Fall of Constantinople. The narratives end with the change of governance in the homelands of the main characters, who are forced to move. The migration causes nostalgia – or repression - of what is lost but the religious artefacts remain as bonds to the past. The paper suggests that that the nostalgic remembrance of religious co-existence and the persistence of cross-religious symbols in the novels function as proposals for a fruitful dealing with religious diversity in contemporary Greek society in disapproval of the growing intolerance.

Tanja Zimmermann, Universität Konstanz.

tanja.zimmermann@uni-konstanz.de

Commemorating Serbia, 5th October 2000: Remembrance and Suppression in Vladimir Milovanović’ “The Face of a Revolution” (2012)

“The Face of a Revolution” (“Lice revolucije”, 2012) is a documentary fiction by the young Serbian film-maker Vladimir Milovanović about the Resistance movement (Otpor) in Serbia that brought Slobodan Milosevic from power on 5th October 2000. The documentary part of the film is dedicated to the student Branko Ilić, at the time one of the popular leaders of the spontaneous movement but today has been forgotten and a broken man. The fictional part of the film is a grotesque unravelling of specific strategies of the post-communist commercial system, especially its methods of abusing revolutionary slogans and symbols for advertising. The film, thus, confronts nostalgic remembrance of a revolution that later failed – when Zoran Đinđić was assassinated – to the cynical ways of misusing slogans from all sorts of revolutions for new commercial aims. “Lice revolucije” is thus symptomatic of a phenomenon widely spread in East and South East Europe. It will be analysed, on the one hand, by actualizing theoretical texts of Russian formalists such as Yury Tynyanov who already in the 1920ies had compared strategies of propaganda to the language of advertisement. However, the transgression of political and commercial slogans is not the only ambiguity between genres. The film itself shifts from documentation to fiction. On the other hand, therefore, the paper will focus on the new nostalgic genre of a documentary-fiction, in this case, documentary-grotesque – a strategy of preserving those parts of the past that did not enter national memory in Serbia, a country deeply divided in constructing its traditions.